POST CHOREOGRAPHIC

[Johannes Birringer]

Although the notion of 'choreography' has not disappeared in the context of contemporary 21st Century performance and virtual art, it has certainly undergone a re-evaluation in terms of how bodily movement/physical intelligence produces data or how performers or immersants engage with an interface environment which is programmable and networked, and how environments instruct moving behaviors.

In examinations of augmented environments (and how these systems perform), a few propositions were made by Birringer and other members of the Interaktionslabor and DAP-Lab since 2006 to paraphrase the notion of the 'post choreographic' --not a new notion in itself -- to emphasize evolving systems behaviors, including physical performer articulations in constant exchange with algorithms and responsive or (semi)autonomous, intelligent audio-visual environments, sensorial flows and hypersensual spaces.

The particular challenges to thinking about 'composition' arise from the real-time synthesis of interface designs-in-motion, based not on choreography but on programming and physical adaptation, which generate “virtual movement” through the digital body-environment interaction.

A lively debate arose in February-March, first on the dance-tech list and then on Birringer's blogsite, and back to the dance-tech list. New and provocative discussions have opened up over the past weeks, and it's difficult to keep translating between list and net.

But very valuable insights are being produced, as we all grapple with the "languages" of our practices/theories, and these insights are [and need to be] saved and archived. We invite more responses from the community here to extend the discourses.

[Jaime del Val - Reverso]

There is no dancer behind the dance

Choreography can be analysed as a form of non verbal communication (I am careful in saying "can be analysed", rather than "is" for the issue in not to generate new ontologies but to locate our subjects of concern within contingent frameworks of analysis that are necessary in so far as they are useful tools to any of us.)

Choreography can also be analysed as part of the humanist project for a hegemonic subject, and therefore implies a subject-dancer, capable of repeating discreticized and intelligible entities, and a subject choreographer that generates them.

Choreography is thus an attempt to tame and reduce the continuum of the non-verbal and of movement and of embodied experience in terms of repeatable and controllable agency, that points or gets near the fictions of universality of language within western thinking, ignoring the uncontrollable and unrepeatable within it or categorizing it as an error.

Choreography, as a form of écriture of the body, is a form of discretisation, based upon a number of naturalised assumptions about what the body is and can and should be, what is intelligible and acceptable as a body, it is therefore a tool to draw the line between the intelligible and the unintelligible, the sovereign and the abject, within contingent contexts of culture and power.

But Choreography is also sedimentation of bodies' improvisations, of its lines of escape, of digressions from norm, in which the lines of the intelligible fluctuate over time.

However choreography is based upon the assumption of repeatability, which always necessitates discrete forms to operate, and stresses the repeatable vs. the irreducible, it must perforce leave out whatever here and now is not reducible and repeatable. Certainly what is reducible and repeatable changes over time as the metaformative processes that conforms culture as field of potential meanings and discretionalities, evolves through multiplicities of bodies' interactions.

The dancer as a subject is only there in so far as we want to reestablish the humanist (or other) notion of the subject within specific regimes of discourse and culture. But going back to Jeannette's quote from Nietzsche, some would argue that, like "there is no doer behind the deed", THERE IS NO DANCER BEHIND THE DANCE: we need not look for a subject-substrate in the dancing body unless we want to reproduce the fiction of the subject as a coherent whole that accounts for the settling of the boundaries between the speakable and the abject.

Note the difference between dance and choregraphy: choreography needs the subject dancer, whereas postchoreography and dance attempt to get away with it: COREOGRAPHY IS TO DANCE WHAT THE ORGANISM IS TO THE BODY AND THE BwO (Body without Organs): the body defies reduction to organicity in its intensive capacity for transformation, as a field of forces rather than fixed materiality. So does dance defy reduction to choreography. What this implies in the end is that both concepts: dance and choreography are under constant transformation, redefining the boundaries of the discreetable.

[Jaime del Val - Reverso]

We Have always been zombies and cyborgs

(Johannes): >>>I like what Zizek wrote about the melancholia of the choreographers. We are not too sure about the virtualization of reality... "but it also opens up the possibility for the one who manipulates the machinery which runs the cyberspace literally to steal our own (virtual) body, depriving us of the control over it, so that one no longer relates to one's body as to 'one's own.' What one encounters here is the constitutive ambiguity of the notion of mediatization." The theft of the body may present a very likely trauma to contemporary dance. br />

Indeed this makes me think of Stelarc's absent bodies. When he was with us in Madrid in December it struck me how insistently he referred to his work in terms of choreography: choreographies of the absent body controlled by remote agents, choreography of the robot arm, choreographies of split physicalities, choreography of the third arm controlled by his stomach muscles... and of course underlying a project for new anatomical architectures of the body in which there is not much room for subjectivity and split physicality, phantom bodies and zombies are seen as an extrusion of awareness which implies no subjectivity. Indeed, quoting him: WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN CYBORGS AND ZOMBIES: we have never been fully in control of ourselves, we have always been acting according to forces that drive us, we have always been construed as subjects that behind the fake appearance of being whole and independent act according to norms that we embody and naturalise.

If this is the case then maybe the new forms of being a zombie in cyberspace will not represent such a risk of our falling apart, though the nostalgia will inevitably arise in so far as the "theft" is made explicit, theft of a fiction of the subject in which we tend to believe. What we need to pay much attention to are the implicit mechanisms of control, the technologies that are defined with the purpose of making us into zombies at the service of market driven forces whilst we believe in free will and autonomous agency. What we need to counteract are the increasingly implicit and hidden technologies of the self that we are embodying at every moment in late-capitalist circles.

The posthuman-postself-postchoreographic, is perhaps an attempt to do away with the fiction of the subject as an entity in self-control, it is an attempt to make explicit all the implicit structures and technologies of power that make us into zombies before we have the possibility to realise it... in order to open up the possibilities to redefine "ourselves" as bodies beyond the naturalised assumption of subjectivity and aware of the fact that we are never under definitive control of anything whatsoever in "ourselves".

[Jaime del Val - Reverso]

We Have always been zombies and cyborgs

read below

[Johannes Birringer]

Brief trackback to your manifesto, returning us here to earlier in April, i think it's quite good to create a little archive here to and see the bits and pieces that created this puzzle of a debate.


Wed 4/2/2008 10:29 AM
From: Jeannette Ginslov
TO: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: post / choreographic



At the risk of repeating what other dance practitioners may have already said and whether anyone is interested or not, i wish to share the following after matt's encouragement - "if the dancer(s) are co-authors at the moment of performance we need to hear from them ... directly." and "the 'freedom'
is in perception (of the performer) not the underlying code or content." and "the tendency is to use technology to re-mediate' the space. this leaves the performers with casual and patterned responses. this conditioning remains even when the code/content/outcomes change."

in my experience during performance with interactive sites, a heightened & amplified sense of focus, perception and seeing, is perhaps what occurs for me at the moment, the gap, or place of interaction.

the irony is that the more one narrows and quietens the focus on that locus of interaction, the more it amplifies the sense of awareness of perception - the five senses and awareness of self, become heightened and allows for a discursive interaction within the self, between the many selves, feelings and ideas, that come alive during performance. it gets a bit 'noisy' at times if you do not concentrate, as they tend to happen simultaneously.

for this to come alive during such performances, a sense of quietness is necessary for intense focus and listening to occur at these loci of interactivity. it is as if you have to walk through a door, squeeze and squash the mind/body binary together, so they merge, and then you are through the door into another sense of perceiving the present, real-time, perceiving and acknowledging it, all at the same time, in your entire body and being.

then during performance i am amazed at how my senses are awakened and how my body memory, that includes habit and the questioning of it, comes forward in my consciousness for the moment of negotiation or choice, to respond. as part author, should i use this or that? milliseconds float by.

an added advantage of being the performer/"enfleshed machine" immersed in the constellation of possible interactions, whether they are causal or not, is that we have an added awareness of audience. the real 'electronic'
machine does not.

the "enfleshed machine" is aware of mind and perceptual flow, seeing in real-time but also seeing shifts in perceptual flow and shifts in perspective, as if there is a constant dialogue within the performer between the different 'performative selves' - one is aware of the structure and responds accordingly, one is aware of the shifts and slight differences that occur at each performance, so cause and effect vary slightly at each performance, one is aware of mistakes and therefore new ideas and possibilities, one that is aware of audience and the desire to evoke an empathetic response in them, (if only they were you) making them as kinetically or emotionally engaged and in an excited/aware state, in that moment of connection, one that is always judging the performance as a whole within a cultural context aware of place in time and history, one that is the personal - body aches, pains, tiredness, energy levels etc, one that is aware of other interferences - extraneous noises etc

it begs the question - for whom and what is this work for? at the moment of co-authorship, it seems to be intensely personal, not for the consumption of an audience, that seems extraneous, outside of 'the moment of choice', unless the result is for the more spectacular. specularity then comes into play and alters the performer's choices.

the need to share what has actually happened at the interface between the highly skilled dancer and the machine, the myriad

[Johannes Birringer]

From: nathaniel stern
Sent: Wed 4/2/2008 11:42 AM
To: [e-mail]
Re: [dance-tech] Re: post / choreographic

Hey Everyone.

Nathaniel Stern here; Jeanette Ginslov emailed and asked me to join the discussion re: our collaboration circa 2001. I'm currently an artist and PhD student at Trinity College, Dublin, writing on interactive art and embodiment for my dissertation - more on me and my art work is online at http://nathanielstern.com I'll also be taking up a digital studio art post at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee in the Fall.

Jeannette sent me the below email about elaborating on the term "enfleshed machine" I used for our performance. Admittedly, at the time, it was a bit idiosyncratic and I thought it sounded "cool" (there must be others who have used the expression; I don't know them), but the basic premise of my thinking stands, and so I thought I might elaborate on what I'm up to right now in order to highlight what we were doing then.

I'm sorry to come into the conversation late, and not as a dancer, and with a few deadlines looming (who doesn't have that?), but glad to take part. My only interaction with dance-tech thus far has been a lively argument with Matthew Gough off-list at some point, where he was making a similar critique around pinning down structure with regards to a presentation I had given in the Real World. I think his point around defining interactivity and incorporating long-standing dance practices into our more recent technologies is an extremely strong one, and worth investigating broadly for dancers and technologists alike - although it's not where my own interests lie, nor where my field of research has lead me.

I'm interested in putting every day gallery-goers in situations where they explore embodiment, movement, interaction, relationality (etc...
I'll add the disclaimer, "even if that means repeating what dance practitioners may already 'know'"). My research sits between performance and cultural studies, and my art centers around – more recently than this piece with Jeanette – ludic interfaces that ask participants to frantically chase or bend or stretch after signs, carefully stutter or quiver between texts. I'm interested in the per-formed (rather than pre-formed) relationships between embodiment and other emergent categories (signification, looking, the production of space, to name a few). I mean this literally, and one fine example is here (check out the video):
http://nathanielstern.com/2003/stuttering/

The term "enfleshed machine" was used in 2001 for several reasons.
First, I wanted it to be thought of as more than a simple "reactive software" -- it drove Jeanette's performance just as much as she drove the projection. I'll paraphrase Brian Massumi in saying that a soccer ball moves the players even more so than the players kick the ball...

Second, it had a skin (the screen), a moving body-image (animated signs and projected shadows), a body-schema (in the shared space of inter-action), a flux of significations (the text), etc. (I'm being reductive in some of this, but I think you get the idea). In other words, even tho it did not have a "body" on its own, it had flesh that might be part of an embodying process (and, I would argue along with Jean-Luc Nancy, that there is no "body" without "bodies," no "being"
unless it is a "being-with" - and so the same would be true of me, Jeannette, you...). Third, and probably most important, I did not want the computer/code/hardware/software/package/thing to be thought of as a prosthetic. That assumes a dominance that, while relevant in the preceding coding, is much more dynamic in the moment of interaction and unpredictability.

That's all I have time for today, but looking forward to responses and more. Warmly,

nathaniel
http://nathanielstern.com

[Johannes Birringer]

From: marko kosnik
Sent: Wed 4/2/2008 3:05 PM
To: [e-mail]
Re: post / choreographic



> I tend to think the kind of work we are discussing is also profoundly
> humanist, as well, as it searches for these margins of indetermination
> (for example,. as i tried to suggest refering to Deborah Hay's work,
> the suspension of habitual causal patterns, the reversals of the logic of cause and effect).

hi johannes, hi list

i find the devotion to humanist orientation really important for the kind of writing i can follow on this list from time to time - if not a bit ambitious. no matter where the quotes and references are coming from, especially from the texts generated in the last decade, much of terminology invented can be weak weak weak and often very ... crapy.
in this sense it is more readable in a poetic sense (well, as bad
poetry) - and this i suggest should not stay neglected. descriptive and poetic is not necessarily out of humanist orientation.

marko kosnik


From: Marlon Barrios-Solano
Sent: Thu 4/3/2008 2:58 AM
To: [e-mail]
Re: post / choreographic

Hello list,

this is a very interesting and relevant discussion as an attempt to ground the understanding of fundamental cognitive phenomena that support the experience/action during improvisational performance and (real-time composition) movement within real-time interactive systems.Cognitive potential, training, skills, coupling with systems...cultural context...all embodied I bring to this discussion some podcasts of interviews with improvisational performers as a series called "embodied techne".

This is one with the Amsterdam based improvisation artist Katie Duck:
Interview
(she is also member of the network!)

She elaborates from pop culture, Magpie, empathy, the internet, method and real-time composition and space/time experience...and death I am using Jump Cut to edit these video on-line...( the first one and a bit clunky) more clips here with improvisers and teachers Liza Nelson, David Zambrano...

and Emmanuele Hyung (on Solo Adaptations by Debora Hay) Interview

Feel free to edit on-line some of them and post them in the network....
http://www.dance-tech.net/group/collaborativeeditingfordancetechnet
You can collaborate editing the interviews on line and "adapating" them Be well, Marlon

PS: Lisa Nelson's interview is amazing and an edited version will be ready soon thanks to Ashley Friend. Important relationship of Nelson's approach and J.J. Gibson theories on ecological psychology is presented...

[Johannes Birringer]

Tracking back further.

(1) responses to the March-April thread on the "post choreographic":

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 posting by Johannes Birringer post choreographic

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 response my Matt Gough post choreographic

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 posting by Jeannette Ginslov dance tech network attacks

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 response by Simon Biggs dance tech network attacks

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 response by Jaime del Val Postcolonial dominations and the "superiority" of academic language...

this created a new thread on the languages we use.

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 response my Matt Gough Postcolonial dominations and the "superiority" of academic language...

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 response by Jaime del Val Postcolonial dominations and the "superiority" of academic language...

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 response by Matt Gough Postcolonial dominations and the "superiority" of academic language...

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 response by Harmony Bench Postcolonial dominations and the "superiority" of academic language...

Tue, 1 Apr 2008 posting by Johannes Birringer post / choreographic

Wed, 2 Apr 2008 response by Matt Gough post / choreographic

Wed, 2 Apr 2008 response by Jenanette Ginslov post / choreographic

Wed, 2 Apr 2008 response by Nathanian Stern (see above in the cited replies).

The Video Interview with Lisa Nelson appeared shortly afterwards and was published on dance tech net on Aprill 11 under the title Moving Viewers

Commentaries to the Interview were posted under the Video.

[Johannes Birringer]

Tracking back continuation 2.

Wed, 2 Apr 2008 response by Matt Gough post / choreographic

Thu, 3 Apr 2008 posting by Jaime del Val expanding the debate Post-structuralist Threads1: Postcolonial

Thu, 3 Apr 2008 posting by Jaime del Val Post-structuralist Threads2: Posthuman-Postbody-Postself---Postchor...

Thu, 3 Apr 2008 posting by Jaime del Val Post-structuralist Threads3: Performative vs. Performatic---Queer---

Thu, 3 Apr 2008 response by Matt Gough Post-structuralist Threads1: Postcolonial

Fri, 4 Apr 2008 response by Jaime del Val Post-structuralist Threads1: Postcolonial

Fri, 4 Apr 2008 posting by Jeannette Ginslov decolonisation and the post self - my notes - Not the old boring wo...

(to be continued.)

[Johannes Birringer]

Conclusion to track back / integration of archived posts on the subject of "post choreographic":

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 posting by Johannes Birringer post / choreographic

Mon, 7 Apr 2008 response by Nathaniel Stern post / choreographic

Tue, 8 Apr 2008 response by Johannes Birringer Thread1: Posthuman-Postbody-Postself---Postcoreography

Tue, 8 Apr 2008 posting by Heide Lazarus post / choreographic

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 response by Jeannette Ginslov Thread1: Posthuman-Postbody-Postself---Postchoreography

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 response by Jaime del Val on 'aura'

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 response by Jaime del Val on performatic and beyond__transcultural

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 Marlon Barrions Solano announces publication of Lisa Nelson Interview on this dance tech net site.

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 posting by Douglas Rosenberg Screendance: State of the Art 2, Curating the Practice/Curating as ...

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 posting by Jeannette Ginslov interview with Lisa Nelson at dance-tech.net

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 posting by Johannes Birringer movement & environment

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 response by Sarah Jane Pell "taking instructions" from the environment and Human Being V's Huma...

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 response by Johannes Birringer "taking instructions" from the environment

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 posting by Jaime del Val There is no dancer behind the dance__We have always been zombies an...

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 response by Jeannette Ginslov Survival strategies for "There is no dancer behind the dance__We ha...

* * * * * * *

[Olu]

Good day to everyone

This is my first contribution to what is a fascinating discussion.

I would like to add that as one of the dance collaborators within Suna no Onna performative project, I find the term post-choreography entirely appropriate, particularly in light of the discussions so far. As a performing artist engaged with the real-time relationships between the metabolic processes of my physical journal (embodied memory and knowledge) and the various interactive digital processes, I am particularly interested in the perceptual distinctions between the terms ‘choreographic’ and ‘post-choreographic’.

The notions of the ‘post’ in the term post-choreographic does not abandon the structural frameworks that underpin the definitions of what in western academic discourses we call ‘choreographic’, as has been indicated in some of the points raised in the debate so far. For me this would be like discussing the post-natal while abandoning the structural nature of pregnancy (and as a father I have the distinction of being a reflective participant/observer). I do not wish to be flippant, but I just want to highlight the point that the two are linked and that the distinctions are by a matter of degree and dimension.

If we make the assumption that the formalising concepts regarding the choreographic, with its emphasis on the vision of the choreographer(s), is ‘prior’ in the Aristotelian sense, to the perspectives of the post-choreographic, then the focus will not be on the choreographers’ aesthetic vision but on the ways in which our complex network of senses and sensor technologies track and trigger the choices and events made within a collaborative process. The primary interface would be between different individuals using real-time devices to feedback information that inform the decisions made in the performances’ ‘now-time’ with respect to an improvisational process; as has been indicated already by others in the course of this debate.

I agree that some of the claims, concerning the post-choreographic label, are similar to improvisational processes found in some of our current choreographic discourses and that the liminal threshold between choice and action in ‘real time’ rely on the immediate relationship between responses from my physical journal’s sensorium and information from the performative context at any instance.

What excites me as a performer and deviser are the liminal spaces created by the dialogical relationship between all the parties involved the presence of an event.
This includes the temporal space makers, including the audio-visual content; all the performers; the audience or reflective participant and real-time technicians.
For me as a performer, the inter-subjective use of improvisational and interactivity differs slightly in this way; within a choreographic context, the structural framework of the improvisation is employed to create an aesthetic of ‘now-ness’, where my focus is to leave a 4 dimensional trace-form by making strategic choices in the potential space that is 5 dimensional (5 dimensions is defined here as an infinite number of 4 dimensional possibilities that can only exist in potential).

When I am in a post-choreographic context my predominant performative perceptions with regards to improvisation, shift from ‘goal oriented outcomes’ to ‘process oriented transformation’ with particular regards to how the audience engages with the context of my performance. I want to emphasis the word ‘pre-dominant’ as way counter any simple dualistic readings here. This slight perceptual shift takes the utility of improvisation as an aesthetic tool and moves it towards improvisation as tool that reveals and explores the liminal threshold in and of its self. The plan is to bring the audience closer to an experience of ‘potential’; a potential that always lies just posterior to a particular moment by highlighting our inter-subjective sensorium; to dilate an experience of a 5 dimensional potential that lies fractionally in front of our position, our place, our ‘now-ness’.

Subjectively I find that these distinctions are useful and interchangeable. I can use a number of different improvisational processes both in ‘devising’ and ‘performing’ when I am choreographing and performing, however when I am focusing on the fluid dynamics of an interactivity that draws an audience toward a space where the particular instance of interactivity is taking place, I find myself focused on the parameters of choice and how I present my developing artistry in the network of metabolic and digital sensors that constitute my sensorium.

[mpgough]

hi, some interesting observations ...

firstly with Suna no Onna i think you are performing the authors aesthetic vision? there is a scenario and a desire to display real-time, embodied interactions. this is prior vision as to the (general) effect of the work. the options / choices you explore have been 'limited' by the scenography, scenario etc.

getting caught up in the notion of 'steps, phrases and ('exact' )repeatability' is a bad idea. someone decided there was going to be a work, and asked you to partake.

i'm also wondering how far (and where) you can separate improvisation practice form the notion of post-choreographic.

if you look at perception based improv it is process based (e.g. lisa nelson). only structured and stimuli based improv is goal based (tasks). and, if we accept the performative notion of liminal (i don't), improvisation is always on the threshold.

improv has 'now-ness' and the '4-d trace', except this is not a useful identifier. taking paths through a range of options / possibilities is a core improvisation concept ... but we 'effect' the 5th dimension simply by observing, even without a 'performative / compositional' focus.

good improvisation, is a utility not an aesthetic. there are many misunderstandings about improvisation and i wonder if that where the confusion around 'post-choreographic' lies.

when composing in real-time you must always look ahead, otherwise the composition falls further 'after'. when watching improv we look for these potentials and then observe the outcome.

remember, we can only follow one 5th dimensional path. we collapse the other paths by observing and acting. so yes, this is choice ... but again something we all do. it is not unique. and, if we wanted to take alternate 5-d paths we would have to move to the 6th dimension. imagining the alternatives is not the same as following them.

so ...

the threshold of potential(s) and choice (action) in improv mean we can think of it as liminal. and by its very nature the choices are made at points of interaction (others, self, media, environment, etc.). the options/choices are perceived through our senses and cognition.

given this, i feel you are describing your/an improvisation practice within a mediated / transductive environment. unless 'post-choreographic' is the new term for improv there is no new practice here.

the only place you leave for the post-choreographic is the technology itself. (remember, you are not perceiving what the sensors perceive).

beyond the human elements how does the technology interact, is the "track and trigger" really fluid or more static (goal / task orientated)?

or perhaps it is your improvisation that locates and develops the intersections and interactions? the technology simply 'responds'.

[Olu]

Thanks for this, I apologise if i did not make myself clear in the first place. When I mention that I am a performer in Suna no Onna, this was by way of introduction. The point I was making, I made with reference to me as a performing artist and deviser. I agree that I was invited to partake in the authors' prescibed visons, but with due respect this is not what I was referring to. When I talk about structural frameworks with regards to a notion of the 'choreographic' I am certainly not so ignorant as to think that i would get, as you put it, 'caught up in the notion of 'steps, phrases and ('exact' ) repeatability'. This assumption I find curious! Also I do not separate improvisation practice from the notion of post-choreographic. I was trying to draw attention to the 'perception' and 'focus', not the 'act of' improvisation; with it's current and future roles.

Yes improv is process based and improvisation is always on the threshold; in the 'now-time', but the choreutic 4d trace forms left by the act of improvised movement, are essentially memory traces; performed act. I do not agree that we affect the 5d by observing events, as the 5d is alway in an abstract potential future . What we do is affect our experience of what is happening now! When we make a choice, we collaspse an infiinate number of choreutic potentials that will never be actual, that is the nature of 5 dimensions.

Good improvisation, is a utility not an aesthetic I agree, but this depends on the different performative contexts and trans-cultural values.

King regards

Olu